As I wrote in an earlier posting, liquidation of the IGSI online bookstore has resulted in piles of books and maps throughout my dining room.  Orders from IGSI members are staged there and ready to be packed up for mailing. It's a little messy but a joy to have access to so many books. I can walk by, pick up a title and scan the contents - or sit down and read a chapter or two. A bit like living in a library or bookstore.

This morning I opened a skinny little book, The Irish Roots Guide, by Tony McCarthy. The book happened to open to Chapter 3, and the first words grabbed me: "The Pareto Principle..." Oh my! I was instantly transported back to the 1980s - to quality circles, the Japanese concept of "Total Quality Management" and Pareto charts. Remember the Pareto Principle? It was also known as the "80-20 rule" or the law of "the vital few." Developed by an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto, the principle named after him says 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. At my workplace we drew Pareto charts to identify the most significant causes of errors/problems. Tony McCarthy wrote his book in 1991, on the heels of the quality revolution of the 1980s. He says the Pareto Principle applies to family history like this: "80 per cent of the records refer to a mere 20 per cent of the people," with a corollary: "only 20 per cent of all documentary material is relevant as far as 80 per cent of the people is concerned." McCarthy postulates that 75% of Irish people descend from Irish tenant farmers and identifies a number of record sources that are not likely to yield helpful ancestral information. While Chapter 3 of his book covers "Twelve Major Sources," McCarthy suggests only six can be reasonably expected to be productive: "census returns, civil registration, parish records, land commission records, Griffith's Valuation and the tithe applotment books." A disappointing theory as I'd always hoped to find a "silver bullet" in some obscure, newly-uncovered source. The Irish Roots Guide is certainly much more than a few paragraphs about the Pareto Principle. The back cover of the book carries these claims:

• offers clear, step-by-step instructions
• provides an introduction to each of the important documentary collections
• equips you to do your own research in the Irish archives, showing how to avoid pitfalls
• adopts a fresh approach to family history, debunks myths, and never forgets that half of our ancestors were women.